Women contribute most to society when they raise their children full-time, while the main role of men is to “protect and provide”—and this is the way it’s always been. That, at least, is the impression given by current trends, from “tradwives” to “alpha” males to, even, proclamations made by members of the Trump administration themselves (a mention of “childless cat ladies” comes to mind).
“Just to be sexist, and put it in sexist terms, women think of a man as a provider,” Joe Rogan said on his wildly popular podcast in 2023. “There’s this, like, evolutionary aspect.” In March 2025, parenting author Erica Komisar argued that mothers should stay at home for at least the first three years of their children’s lives, commenting on The Diary of a CEO podcast that, “from an evolutionary perspective,” this type of caregiving was standard.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]The problem? It’s untrue. As the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy put it to me, “Except for blips in history, men have never really been breadwinners, supporting a woman at home.”
Even now, globally, “the male breadwinner–female homemaker division of labour is… unusual,” writes evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear. “Childcare is not the exclusive preserve of women in most societies and, even more so, productive labour is not the exclusive preserve of men.”
That includes during our hunter-gatherer days, which account for some 95% of human evolutionary history. The idea of “man the hunter, woman the caregiver,” widely popularized by (male) anthropologists in the 1960s, is, Hrdy notes, a massively “mistaken trope.”
There’s growing evidence that, in many hunter-gatherer cultures, women hunted. How common this was is debated, but it may not matter—because either way, women were key in provisioning food for their community. In fact, in several foraging societies in sub-Saharan Africa, often considered the closest likenesses to our shared evolutionary past, women’s average contribution to their community’s calorie intake range between 60 and 80%. These societies could survive without the sporadic acquisition of meat, anthropologists note. But they could not survive without the tubers and other plants reliably, and consistently, dug up or picked by women.
It’s true that women have historically combined caregiving and work duties, especially in infancy: think foraging with a baby on the back. But they also had a lot of help. Take central Africa’s Efe society in the Ituri Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At 18 weeks old, Efe infants already spend 60% of their time being cared for by someone other than their mother; they are passed from one caregiver to the next more than eight times per hour. While the Efe are on the extreme end, “alloparents”—nonbiological parents—are on hand across foraging societies, so a mother can focus on acquiring food, water, or firewood. As Hrdy argued 16 years ago in her book Mothers and Others, communal care may have been the very foundation for how modern humans came to be. And it didn’t just mean mothers and fathers had help caring for their children—it also meant they had help provisioning them. In other words, the idea that any family unit had to rely entirely on a mother and father in isolation for breadwinning (never mind a father alone) is a myth.
What changed? First, the move to farming. As nomadic societies settled and began to grow their own food, the average number of children per mother rose sharply, even doubling, tethering women more to caretaking responsibilities. Divisions of labor sharpened, with women’s work increasingly taking place within the home. Then came Christianity, with its Biblical injunctions that man must provide for their families or be “worse than an infidel.” (Women, meanwhile, should be “keepers at home.”)
Still, more women labored in farming communities than you might think. In medieval Europe, “peasant women worked alongside men doing almost exactly the same jobs in the fields,” medieval history Eleanor Janega noted previously. In cities, they worked as servants, nannies, craftspeople, or bookkeepers for the family business.
Read More: Medieval Women Were a Vital Part of the Workforce. We Can Learn from Them
Even as the Industrial Revolution turned society upside-down, women continued to work outside of the home. (And, it goes without saying, then, as now, they worked hard inside the home, too—whether by taking on paid work, like sewing, being lodgers, or handling unpaid domestic duties.) At factories, they were seen as such attractive employees, often because owners could pay them lower wages than men, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to limit women’s work hours. Female employment also was kept down through policies like “marriage bars,” which banned married women from paid work. Even so, women often sought paid work outside of the home. By 1900, the census reported that 1 in 5 U.S. workers were women. Yet actual numbers were likely far higher, given that paid work was narrowly defined to be work that, among other criteria, someone chiefly depended for support—unlikely for many married women—not to mention that the stigma against working women meant that few families were likely to report this work accurately to a census taker.
Meanwhile, women educated themselves in great numbers: by 1930, around 4 in 10 students graduating with a bachelor’s or master’s degree were female.
So while World War Two’s “Rosie the Riveter” might have been new, “Rosie the worker,” even “Rosie the provider,” was not. When the war ended, considerable cultural, economic, even legal efforts were put into convincing women that they should stay at home. Yet women still worked. Even through the “happy housewife” decade of the 1950s, female labor participation continued to rise.
Today, two-thirds of U.S. mothers work outside the home, in almost equal measures across party lines.
“We developed this expectation of ‘man as breadwinner’ very recently in our evolution. And it’s bad for everyone,” says Melissa Hogenboom, author of the forthcoming book Breadwinners. “It is terrible for female equality. But it’s bad for men too. The pressure for fathers to work long hours is harmful for their relationships, their children and their marriages—and for their mental health.”
By foreclosing on the possibility that men can be equal, never mind primary, caregivers, our “man the provider” trope has also done fathers a disservice. Much has been made of recent findings that mothers’ brains change in pregnancy. But, as Hrdy explores in her latest book, Father Time, men’s brains and hormones also change—and the more involved a father is, the more pronounced these changes are.
That we aren’t tapping into this caregiving potential of men is hurting them. “It’s no accident that a lot of men feel unneeded, cast aside, that three out of five deaths of despair from drug addiction and suicide are men,” Hrdy says. “There is a vast untapped potential for caring in men, and by expressing it, they may find new sources of meaning.”
To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a mother raising children full-time; for many families, it can be ideal. Implying it should be the standard for all because it is the way it “always” was, however, is wrong—literally, and because it holds everyone back from their full potential: both women and men.
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